http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...075530.htm
The guy who is responsible for this "discovery" is a gentleman named Mark McMenamin. First off let me go ahead and state that this is COMPLETE BULLSHIT. He should never be taken seriously and in recent years he has produced less and less coherent and reasonable hypotheses. He presented his "findings" at GSA (Geological Society of America) in Minneapolis, MN a few days ago. These deposits of Icthyosaurs is real, but his interpretation of them being the result of a giant kraken midden is complete bullshit. There is NO evidence to support this claim!!!! He says that the arrangement of the vertebrae is the kraken trying to arrange the bones into a picture of itself. Once again, this is complete bullshit. He had an article in Discovery News last year before his GSA talk, and it was about trilobite cannibalization and it too was complete bullshit. He has given other talks about evidence for mind control in the fossil record and even alien symbols in rocks. His claims are erroneous and bullshit!!!!!

My topic this week is obviously a bit of a rant at the absurd notion that this guys abstracts and talks are being popularized by the media as scientific fact when they are completely devoid of any proof or reasonable assumptions.

I thought this week it might be best to show off some neat fossils I saw on a trip through the Devonian rocks of New York state. Most of these come from the early-middle Devonian (~385mya). The first picture is a placoderm head shield. This is the armoring for a fish that is currently exitinct and is closely related to another big fish known as Dunkleosteous. Look him up!. The second picture is a shark spine from the same location. This is a true shark and these spines are part of their fins and were most likely for protection against the placoderms. At another locality a series of shark spines is found near a placoderm that has one of these spines shoved through its braincase! The third picture is a fish tooth. A rather sharp little dagger and there are also tooth whorls of lobe-finned fishes here as well (the lobe-finned fish are the ancestors to the tetrapods). The last picture is from a different locality and is the calyx of a crinoid. These are stalked organisms that filter feed and are found mostly in deepwater today but some stalkless forms live on reefs too.

T-rex was no small teenager apparently. I am always a bit skeptical about computer models, but this essentially refines earlier attempts to define the size of dinosaurs, without the need for scale models. And they also use the minimum estimate for body size to calculate a weight for SUE at around 9 tons!. Imagine that running at you.

An intriguing discovery from some of the Baltic Amber. A digital imaging process (x-ray computed tomography) enabled the paleontologists to take a 3D image of the spider within the amber and they discovered a mite attached to the head of the spider too. Very interesting and neat.http://news.discovery.com/animals/shiedc...11107.html

Okay, another one because this is simply awesome. A new species of whale from ~40 million years ago. This is during the transition from water to land. The earliest ancestor of whales was about 50-55 million years ago and was called Ambulocetus. This new fossil is ~15million years later and shows the transitions that have occurred as whales begin to adopt a fully marine life habit.

In other words, one more major transitional fossil the creationists will ignore.

Since Turkey-day is quickly approaching, I decided to do an article of an avian variety. This is an article from a paper published in Nature this year and is a description of a new fossil that is ~145-161 million years old and is closely related to Archaeopteryx. Its close relationship with Archaeopteryx based on morphological similarities has led the authors to conclude that Archaeopteryx and its closest cousins are in fact still dinosaurs and not avian-dinosaurs (birds). This is very intriguing and will continued to be tested but demonstrates rather well the fact that birds are as closely related to dinosaurs as one can get.